]]>Google Image search is a very valuable feature for the average PC user. A good set of its basic features has found its way into Android smartphones as well. Now, the keyword here is “basic”. That is to say, unless you have any use of a tiny desktop Web page on your phone screen you are limited to seeing one image at a time, and not much else.

Google Image Search for iPad has essentially more features, so it’s more functional. Now, these features are coming to Android tablets.

Nathan Beach, Product Manager at Google, states,

As someone who enjoys being outdoors, I like exploring beautiful images of nature. With the new image carousel, I can discover photos of bright sea anemones or colorful lorikeet birds on my tablet in a more interactive and immersive way. Now when I tap on an image result, it’ll expand in the carousel view and I can swipe through the search results. To learn more about an image, a tap on the web page preview, title, description or URL will take me directly to the webpage. See how you can take the image carousel for a spin:

Carouseling image search results is great not only for tablets: phones with smaller screens can profit from that feature, too. Now, the really new, essentially “tablet” feature here is the ability to bring up all the pertinent information that Google keeps for this particular image. It can be invoked by a simple tap on it. Taps and swipes can also help in navigating to image sources such as Web page where Google has found it.

The searches among many samples of a given image can be further enhanced by adding Web page previews, so an image researcher gets a very effective browsing tool to get to the roots of his or her image research. All of it can be done on an Android tablet with literally a few finger flicks.

In the Android world, the demand of apps specifically tooled for use on tablets is very great. Many good and popular “phone-sized” Android apps are still showing this or that symptoms of “growth pain”. For example, a simple scaling up of a small app just doesn’t cut it in most of the cases. A total redesign of Google Image search is a good example of how necessary, yet difficult, this optimization process is.

Check out the video below to see Google’s ad showing off the new redesign: